Identification

Title

Evaluation of snow water equivalent in NARCCAP simulations, including measures of observational uncertainty

Abstract

This study evaluates snow water equivalent (SWE) over North America in the reanalysis-driven NARC-CAP regional climate model (RCM) experiments. Examination of SWE in these runs allows for the identification of bias due to RCM configuration, separate from inherited GCM bias. SWE from the models is compared to SWE from a new ensemble observational product to evaluate the RCMs' ability to capture the magnitude, spatial distribution, duration, and timing of the snow season. This new dataset includes data from 14 different sources in five different types. Consideration of the associated uncertainty in observed SWE strongly influences the appearance of bias in RCM-generated SWE. Of the sixNARCCAP RCMs, the version of MM5run by Iowa State University (MM5I) is found to best represent SWE despite its use of the Noah land surface model. CRCM overestimates SWE because of cold temperature biases and surface temperature parameterization options, while RegCM3 (RCM3) does so because of excessive precipitation. HadRM3 (HRM3) underestimates SWE because of warm temperature biases, while in the version of WRF using the Grell scheme (WRFG) and ECPC-RSM (ECP2), the misrepresentation of snow in the Noah land surface model plays the dominant role in SWE bias, particularly in ECP2 where sublimation is too high.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7m61nwp

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2017-09-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact